Ghosts by Matt Rogers (ap literature book list txt) 📕

not fetching electrolytes from the fridge, not stretching, not moving at all. The man had his elbows on the kitchen island and a faraway look in his eyes. He was staring into space.

Thinking.

Slater said, ‘What?’

King looked up.

He said, ‘I need your help.’

8

Violetta saw King arrive home.

She straightened up in the metal desk chair, surrounded by what encompassed her makeshift ops centre. It was nothing in comparison to the DARPA-grade resources she’d had access to a month previously, but there was no need to match her old tech. In her role as black-operations handler, she’d been responsible for running a large swathe of clandestine ops for an entire country. Now, she was focused first and foremost on the anonymity of four people — herself included. All that took was an assortment of monitors, servers and cables, not endless banks of servers carrying out large-scale data processing.

From this study she ran security for the estate.

All was clear and the perimeter was locked down, just as it had been for the last thirty days straight.

Alonzo had proved his competence.

The government wasn’t looking for them.

They were invisible.

They were ghosts.

But she maintained a rigid routine anyway, because there was no harm in being overly cautious. Satisfied with the lack of excitement on the triple-monitor setup, she was about to peel out of the chair when King came into frame, finishing his run in the lee of the front awning. He tapped his watch to stop the workout, put his hands on his hips, but didn’t go inside immediately. He stood out the front, pondering something, which she only noted because it wasn’t like him to waste time.

She watched him standing there as the thwack of elbows hitting pads echoed from a distant corner of the second floor.

She loved him.

And she knew he loved her.

That’s all there was to it. It was shockingly normal in their crazy, mile-a-minute world, and that was what made it so pure. But deep down she knew the last thirty days had been far too grounded, far too uneventful. Sure, there’d been training and evolving and the implementation of a strict routine, but she knew he and Slater needed order and chaos in equal measure, or they’d consider themselves nothing more than wasted potential.

Violetta knew it would come to this.

King was out there, contemplating, because he’d found something that needed fixing.

That’s what ghosts do best.

They haunt the living.

When he came out of his stupor and made for the front door Violetta killed the exterior feeds, powering the screens down as the servers hummed steadily in the background. There was nothing more to see.

Above her head, faint footfalls headed for the stairs.

Slater, coming to check.

Slater knew something was up, too. Maybe it was the timing. Maybe it was purely a sixth sense. But she heard Slater go downstairs into the kitchen, and she waited in the privacy of the ops centre for the conversation to play out. She wasn’t the type to intrude. King would come to her in his own time.

And he did.

They spoke for fifteen minutes in the kitchen. Then footfalls came toward her. The door opened, and King stepped into the room, still perspiring from his ever-consistent morning exertion. She rose and went to him, and put her hands on his chest, and stood on her tiptoes and planted a kiss on his lips.

He pulled her in close.

He said, ‘I found something.’

She said, ‘I know.’

‘You do?’

She reached out and tapped one of the black screens. ‘You were out front for a while.’

‘Only a minute or so.’

‘For you, that’s a while.’

He nodded. ‘I was thinking.’

‘What happened?’

He told her every detail. Every spoken word. Every action. The shaky conclusion to the whole thing.

Violetta processed it all. She kept her cool — her specialty. Maintaining a level head in high-stress situations was her forte. She wouldn’t have survived a day in her old job without it.

She said, ‘You know what this might unravel.’

‘I know it’ll go deep.’

‘Do you think it’s wise for us to put that heat on ourselves so soon after what happened?’

‘It shouldn’t matter. If we start coming up with excuses not to act, it’ll open the floodgates. You know that.’

‘There’s being brave, and there’s being reckless.’

King smiled. ‘They go hand in hand.’

She sighed.

He said, ‘You knew what this was going to be when we ran. We weren’t going to play defence forever.’

‘I’m fully aware of that,’ she said. ‘If I’m in, then I’m all in. I’m just trying to convince myself it’s a good idea.’

‘It’s never a good idea.’

‘It won’t stop at Wan’s.’

‘Which is why we’re not going to approach it like it will.’

She looked into his eyes. ‘You’re not going to storm in there and smash heads together?’

‘Unlikely.’

A smirk crossed her face. ‘That’s uncharacteristic.’

‘I’ll pretend I’m offended by that.’

She thought for a moment, then said, ‘She looked like me, huh?’

King pretended to think about it in turn. Then he mock-sighed. ‘You were bound to find out sooner or later…’

‘What?’

‘This is a new era. I’m only in the business of helping supermodels.’

She slapped him playfully on the chest.

He winked and sauntered out.

She stayed behind, but there was no tension. It didn’t even cross her mind. Jealousy couldn’t exist in their world — they operated at the fringes of the human emotional spectrum. When going to work meant putting their lives on the line, petty relationship squabbles fell to the wayside. It was something they’d never even addressed — it just was.

Nothing they did would work if they didn’t trust each other with their lives, and that encompassed all of your usual partnership issues.

She wasn’t used to her new life. Not yet.

She was an outcast, a rogue, exiled from the government she’d spent half her life serving.

But there was no one she’d rather do it alongside than Jason King, Will Slater, and Alexis Diaz.

She followed him out of the ops centre.

9

As the sun went down, Slater dressed for the night ahead.

Not his usual getup, but it wasn’t a usual night.

He stepped into the walk-in wardrobe of the bedroom